1 September 2003

What I hate in There # (which will stop beta testing in early October, so I’ve still got one month of free play, even though I mostly get bored in there) it what I hate in life: being poor, not being able to buy anything, and having to work or buy money in order to spend.

But… in There, I managed to earn some money. I designed a T-shirt, put it on sale, and already a half-dozen got sold without me doing anything. Which means $10,000 (Theredollars, not real, duh) in three days. How did I make it? Because I could make a design by myself and for myself, upload it, put it on sale, and never have to listen to customers’ complaints or requests. That’s how I work.

The conclusion is easily drawn. Not that I must add a T-shirt store to garoo.net, first because it wouldn’t work as well, second because it’s much more complex to design and manufacture T-shirts in real life than in a video game, and finally because opening an online store involves lots of paperwork, some of which costing money that I’d have to hope recouping later. No, the conclusion is that I’m destined to be a craftsman in a countryside shack. Oh, and then become psychotic because of isolation, obviously. But at least I’ll have earned a living. And it won’t bother anyone anyway, since I’ll be isolated.

I used to believe I was made to breed goats in the mountains or become a rich and famous artist, but in fact I’ll just make statues out of recycled springs and hub caps. Joy.

Though the rich and famous artist option could have worked, too. But nobody discovered me, and I’m too much of a loser to discover myself.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the common wiki philosophy of registering under your RealName (I think it’s common to many wikis, not just CraoWiki). But I forgot this argument:

Besides, the use of a RealName forces to a certain responsabilization regarding the contents you add to the WiKi, and entices to adopt online behaviors close to RealLife.

True that the supposed anonymity of Internet has long been causing a frightening drift in behaviors. Imagine if it permeated real life, and people started walking around wearing black hoods so they could insult everyone in the street without retort. (That’s the first step; the second is when everybody walks around with a baseball bat.)

2 September

3 September

I just found this enjoyable analogy: Nobody would accept that a bank teller, for instance, only speak an unintelligible lingo, so nobody should accept that a website only speak a bastardized, non-W3C-validated version of HTML. What I like about this analogy is that, precisely, the evolution of language hasn’t been dictated by the government (nor by the dictionary makers), but by usage. If HTML evolution wasn’t dictated by the W3C (nor the Internet Explorer makers) but by usage, we wouldn’t be ending up using Flash or PDF when we want to have some kind of control over presentation.

I may expand about this after Alias.

P.S. I’ll detail one aspect of my idea. When I write about usage, I don’t mean what Microsoft does with its browser (to keep the analogy, it’s as if your word processor started automatically converting your text into slang), but what’s wanted and asked for by the language users, those who express themselves, the webdesigners. And what they want, as everybody knows, is more control over display, presentation, everything that’s quite imperfectly brought by Flash and Acrobat, and explains the plugins’ growing footprint on the web despite their flaws.

Why do I proudly display the invalidity of my markup? What’s my beef against W3C? (I’m coming back to this topic because I realize that, in my latest posts about this, I kinda lost my point myself.) I simply disagree with the current ideology that expects every document on the web to be accessible, without modification, for any possible reader, any possible format. That’s absurd on two counts.

First because, by now, every site of any interest (i.e., any site but personal sites — and that’s not even true anymore with blogs) is generated by scripts, either at display time or when content is added, and this means that the cost of making a parallel, light version of documents is far outweighed by the design restraints imposed by single-version accessibility. (Evidence: the existence of Flash sites with a text version, or the many newspapers that provide printable versions of their articles.)

Second because the organization and volume of contents mustn’t be the same whatever the medium: for instance, a blog home page can easily display the twenty or thirty latest articles on a computer screen, but will be a pain to load and read over a cellphone, no matter how much it uses CSS. Different medium, different content.

Oh, but I know all too well that standard aficionados are way beyond any kind of rational argument, and they won’t change their minds. The only option we’re left with is waiting for a group to fork the HTML standard into a design-oriented language. A mix of HTML, Flash and Acrobat. Of course, considering that Mozilla is the home of standardists, and that Microsoft won’t significantly update Exploder (I’ll leave the typo/slip, it’s nice), spreading this would be hard. Maybe with a plugin, provided it’s lighter than Acrobat.

We should hurry anyway, before Macromedia realizes that Flash could very well take over the market if it was developed in the right direction.

8 September

With AOL, being at 100% is not an option. That’s the latest slogan of AOL France. Does it sound as weird for you as it does for me? That’s because It’s not an option pretty much has opposite meanings in French and English. So I guess it sounds just natural for most of the French audience. But it just makes me jump every time I hear it. I’ve been using AOL for two years (because they were the first offering a flat-fee dialup access in France), so I’ve got a huge smile on my face when I hear that. Yeah. Don’t change a thing, it’s a perfect slogan.

10 September

I complained about being more spammed by antivirus replies than by viruses themselves. I’m not the only one anymore. (Well, I know, I probably wasn’t the only one at the time, I’m not a leader, I just follow the drift.) What I hadn’t thought about what that it’s not accidental:

One of the companies we polled asserts that the antivirus programs’ default settings have been designed for reasons of commercial policy. It is true that technically it creates an additional flow of mail messages, but that’s the price to be paid for free advertising that’s not really spam.

How nice. Not really spam? One could argue about that, don’t you think?